This Is My Brain in Love

by I. W. Gregorio

  Using tongue is some next-level shit, and all I can think about is the YouTube video I once saw on how Hollywood special effects people use accelerants to turn ordinary fires (which are perfectly great for roasting marshmallows and boiling water) into spectacular conflagrations that make Tom Cruise/Vin Diesel/any actor named Chris look like total badasses.

  Tongue is totally an accelerant, and not only for my heart rate. All of a sudden, Will’s hand is feverishly clutching at my waist, and when his thumb brushes a sliver of bare skin I feel a heavy, twisty sensation in what my mother calls my womanly areas, and seriously, why am I thinking of my mom right now?

  WILL

  Kissing Jocelyn is a little bit like jumping off a cliff and a little bit like sliding a puzzle piece into place. I don’t know if it’s possible to feel completely unmoored and completely grounded at the same time, but that’s the only way I can describe it.

  Thank God she had the nerve to make the first move. I was sitting there like a complete doofus wondering if it was too soon to lean in for a kiss, trying to figure out whether it was still cool to ask a girl for permission to kiss her, or whether it’d make me look like I was trying too hard.

  I’d just decided that consent is always sexy, when Jocelyn bulldozed through all my doubts. She planted her flag. And I, obviously, had no problems with being claimed.

  Well, maybe one problem. In my pants.

  It turns out that wearing jeans was a strategic error, as was waiting until I was crammed in the front seat of a Nissan Leaf to get my game going. But I make do, and when Jocelyn snakes her hand up around my neck to press me deeper into our kiss, it’s impossible for me to concentrate on anything other than the softness of her lips, the heat of her tongue, and the feel of the curve of her hips under my hands.

  The trouble with being labeled the quiet kid in school has always been the massive contradiction between my rep with the outside world and how freaking loud my thoughts are in my head. It’s like when people look at me they think I’m just a pot sitting on a turned-off stove, but really my mind is constantly at that point just before a simmer—where you can hear the rumbling of water vapor evaporating against metal.

  I feel like I’ve finally, finally broken into a boil. There’s a crack in the facade of reserve that’s kept me back, held me on the sidelines all my life. It’s possible to see myself doing so many things, if I’m here kissing a gorgeous, smart, funny girl. If she’s kissing me back. If she likes me.

  I feel expansive. Invincible. I feel like I can control time, and that I’ll live in this moment forever, in this bubble of warmth and skin like silk and stuttered breaths.

  And then:

  Crack

  I’m sure it’s a gunshot at first, and I break away from Jocelyn. It takes just a fraction of a second for a vise to close around my chest, and I’m breathless for an entirely different reason. The world closes around me.

  CrackCrackCrack

  The sound is too close, and I realize it’s someone pounding on Jocelyn’s window with something metal the same time a blinding light shatters my night vision. I close my eyes against the physical pain.

  My hands are already up, the gesture automatic. Because if my mother has told me once, she’s told me a thousand times: Always remember to show my hands.

  JOCELYN

  My first thought is that it’s a cop, and I almost want to laugh, because how cliché is it to be caught necking in a parking lot? Not that we went that far. Next to me, Will freezes and puts his hands up. In the light that suddenly shines from behind me, I can see the whites of his eyes, and the terror I see there pierces my chest like a sliver of ice. Of course he would have a different reaction to seeing a police officer than I would.

  “It’s okay,” I whisper, “we haven’t done anything wrong.” Will has turned his head to shy away from the sudden flash of light, so he doesn’t look at me. His eyes are tightly shut, the muscles in his jaw rigid.

  I wince at another sharp rap on the window that’s so loud I can feel it in my bones.

  “Hello, hello.” It’s a man’s voice, impatient, and heavily accented. An icy ball of fear forms in my stomach.

  If my life were a feature film, this is the moment when things would drop into super-slow motion and the heroine’s eyes would open in recognition as a distorted voice suddenly sharpened into clear words:

  “Xiao Jia, Xiao Jia, ni zai gan shenme?”

  Then the camera would cut to the shot of an irate, slightly balding Chinese man trying to break down the car window with a handful of keys while waving around his cell phone flashlight in a furious attempt to get the attention of the dead-in-the-water teens inside.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say weakly.

  This Is My Brain on Consequences

  WILL

  When I first realize it’s Jocelyn’s father and not the Utica Police Department banging on my car window, I almost pass out with relief. My hands tremble as I lower them; I can feel my heart still racing as I force myself to take deep breaths.

  Then embarrassment floods in, warming my cheeks, as I think of Mr. Wu’s “no hanky-panky” warning. Thank God my hands were well above Jocelyn’s waist and over all articles of clothing.

  Mr. Wu raps on the door again, gesticulating wildly, and Jocelyn sends me a pained look before pulling at the door handle. “Later,” she mouths as the night air fills with rapid-fire Mandarin. The door’s not even open an inch before her dad is reaching in to haul her out. When she’s gone it’s like someone’s vacuumed out the life in the car.

  Then the door swings wide open and Mr. Wu leans in to get a look at who’s in the driver’s seat. His eyes widen with shock, then the surprise turns into a complicated expression halfway between disappointment and disgust.

  Then he’s gone, probably on his way to dig me a hole so deep I may never see sunlight again.

  JOCELYN

  My dad sits in stony silence the entire ride home, which is how I know that I’m in deep, deep trouble. Everyone knows that my dad is a blusterer, so my family’s learned to just let his ramblings roll off our backs, and his fits of loud outrage tend to burn out quickly. When he’s quiet, though, it means that his anger has so entrenched itself that it’s become part of the very marrow of his bones.

  The last time I saw my dad this upset was when he found out that Alan was falsifying my mom’s signature on the math tests he’d flunked. Failing a test was bad enough. I had to admit to being kind of in awe that my kid brother had leveled up to forgery. For a while I couldn’t decide whether to feel good that I was suddenly the golden child or pathetic that I seemed like such a Goody Two-shoes in comparison.

  Months later, my dad still has a short fuse when it comes to Alan, and they do a lot of ignoring each other when they are in the same room, which suits Alan just fine. His big punishment was summer school—he’s happy to fly under the radar for the rest of the time. I can only hope that I will be that lucky.

  As we drive home, I pray that my dad will yell. I just want him to tell me what he’s most mad about, so I can feel bad about that one thing, instead of all of it. He could be mad at me for not doing my summer project with Priya, or that I lied about where I was. He could be upset that I was kissing a boy, or pissed that I was alone in a dark parking lot with said boy. When you put it all together, it’s just a freaking Niagara Falls of bad decisions, and I want to hit the undo button of my life so, so much right now.

  But my dad stews, and my guilt simmers.

  “I’m sorry,” I say in a small voice after a few minutes of silence. My dad doesn’t even look at me, just stares straight ahead. There’s a jerky acceleration as he puts on more gas, but he doesn’t respond.

  I am in so much trouble.

  When we pull into the lot behind A-Plus, my dad brakes harder than he usually does, and I wince at the crunch of gravel. He doesn’t spare me a glance as he yanks the keys out of the ignition and opens the driver door. After my dad disappears into the rear entrance of the restaurant I sit f
or a couple more seconds, bracing myself for the reckoning.

  They don’t still make chastity belts, do they?

  By the time I’ve finally dragged myself upstairs, my dad has broken his vow of silence. My poor mom, who probably just sat down on the couch to watch one of her beloved Law & Order episodes, eyes me with a pinched expression when I walk in before turning back to my father, who is standing in the middle of the room gesticulating wildly as he enumerates my transgressions in Mandarin. Alan is slouched on the floor by the coffee table, making himself as physically small as possible while pretending to do work. I was hoping that the minutes I spent sitting in the car would have given my dad time to get the whole story out, but he’s just getting started.

  “Nide nuer pianle women.” Your daughter lied to us, my dad tells my mom. She wasn’t at the library at all. She left her bicycle at the library unchained, after all the people were gone! It could have been stolen! I had to get out that stupid bike rack that is such a hassle to put on. And then a car comes in and just sits there, and when I go up to see if our daughter is in it, she is kissing. A boy!

  “Aiyo,” my mother exclaims, glancing over at me. For a split second she seems almost excited. Then her eyes narrow, and she asks my dad who it was.

  “Will,” my dad says, making a disgusted face.

  “Shi shenme nan ren?” asks my mom with a confused expression on her face. She apparently doesn’t even know what Will’s name is, even though he’s worked for us for weeks.

  My dad explains, impatiently, that Will is the boy I hired to help out with the restaurant.

  I see the exact nanosecond that the penny drops, that my mother connects the name to the face. Her eyes widen, and her hands cup her mouth and nose as if she could block out the news if she doesn’t breathe in any of the air it was spoken into.

  “Nage hei ren?” she asks, the words like a sucker punch. My chest clenches up, and I can barely breathe with bewildered outrage.

  “The black boy?” is the most generous way for me to interpret my mom’s words, but my second-generation brain translates her Mandarin more literally at first, so what hits me initially is the word-by-word translation, which is “that black person.”

  It’s a quirk of the language that in Mandarin a person isn’t “American” or “British”; they’re “that American person” or “that British person.” It’s a lot like the subtle difference between saying that someone’s “Jewish” versus calling them “a Jew.”

  I want to say, “Hey, Mom. Your bias is showing.” At the same time, my instinct is to make excuses for her. The first-generation Chinese community I grew up with in NYC didn’t have the time or energy to give a damn about cultural sensitivity. Like everyone else in the world, she’s just internalized a shit ton of racist ideas, right?

  None of this is an excuse, though. None of it makes it any easier to hear the mixture of contempt and panicked scandal in my mom’s voice. And let’s face it: Even as I try to justify my mom’s comments, I know in my heart that it’s more than innocent fresh-off-the-boat confusion. I think of the summer days when my mother insists on slathering me with Dollar Tree suntan lotion, not to prevent melanoma but because she’s worried that my skin will “be too dark.” When I tried to explain to her that some people in my school spent hundreds of dollars trying to get artificial tans, she scoffed. “You know who have dark skin in China? Peasants!”

  All of a sudden I’ve reached my limit. I’ve played the role of the silently guilty child for as long as I can.

  “I’m sorry for sneaking around, okay? But I’m not sorry for kissing Will. He’s a really good guy who’s already done a ton to help the restaurant. And let’s just cut to the chase. You’re maddest at me because he’s black. That’s bullshit, and you know it.” I’m loud. I have to be, to cut through my dad’s tirade. I hate that I don’t sound sorry at all. Somewhere underneath all the rage, there’s a part of me that’s terrified by how little I actually care. “Can we just move on to how I’m grounded?”

  My punishment is pretty much what I expected: no cell, no internet for two weeks. I’ll basically be a prisoner to the restaurant. Not like that’s so different from my summer so far. The worst thing, though, is that Will’s fired. My dad eyes me suspiciously when I don’t argue, or cry, or stomp off in a fit. I like to think it’s a sign of maturity, but really it’s a sign of not giving a flying fig about their arbitrary restrictions.

  I’m already calculating how I’ll contact Will behind my parents’ back.

  This Is My Brain on Radio Silence

  WILL

  Fake news expands to fill the space allotted to it.

  The days after kissing Jocelyn are torture. After getting an e-mail from her father saying that I won’t be needed at the restaurant anymore, I have to explain to my mother that I was let go because I was caught fraternizing with my boss. Jocelyn hasn’t responded to my e-mail or texts, and by Sunday night my brain is so saturated with worst-case scenarios that I’m desperate enough to actually call her. As usual I have a couple of false starts, but on the third attempt my thumb hovers over the green call button for only a minute before I close my eyes and tap it.

  It’s probably the first time in my life that I’ve ever been disappointed to get a voice mail. If that isn’t proof positive that I’ve got it bad, I don’t know what is.

  I don’t leave a message the first go-around. Instead, I call again after writing down a few notes, a loose script that I largely abandon as soon as I hear her cheery message: “This is Jocelyn. You know what to do.”

  It throws me, hearing her voice again. When I look down at my notes, they don’t make any sense anymore. After the beep I just start rambling.

  “Hey, Jocelyn. This is Will. I’m calling because I haven’t heard from you, and I wanted to make sure you’re okay, and that you’re not in too much trouble. I…”

  I curse myself. What can I do if she is in trouble if I am the trouble?

  “If you’re satisfied with your message, please press two. If you’d like to rerecord your message, press three.”

  My palms are so sweaty I nearly drop my phone in my rush to press three.

  “Hi, Jocelyn. It’s Will. I wanted to check in and see how things are going. I hope things aren’t too busy at the restaurant, and that your family’s okay. I had a great time last week, and…”

  Ugh. I sound like a creep fishing for some action. I jab the button to delete the message before the completion recording even plays. Then I throw my phone onto my bed, as far away as I can to avert voice-mail disaster, and put my face in my hands the way my dad does when the Jets make a particularly boneheaded play near the line of scrimmage.

  In the darkness, with my fingers pressed tight against my closed eyes, I remind myself why I’m calling. I’m not calling to stalk her, or push an agenda, or to rush in like a knight in shining armor to solve all her problems.

  I’m calling to show I care.

  Before my third attempt at leaving a message, I take half a dozen centering breaths before dialing. As the phone rings, I remind myself how it felt to hold her hand, and remember the feeling of her forehead pressed against mine, how it grounded me and gave me a place to land.

  “Hey, Jocelyn. It’s Will. Just wanted to call and say that I’m thinking about you. I miss you. Hope we can talk soon.”

  In the first hour after leaving my voice mail, I check my phone twice to make sure the ringer is on. My clock tells me that it’s time to sleep, but my body is restless, buzzing with a physical need to hear Jocelyn’s voice.

  I scroll through my curated news feed until my eyes sting. There’s another think piece about the Two Americas, and an investigation into yet another episode of police brutality. I read some analysis of recent events in the Middle East, and a feature on a couple whose baby was born intersex—with biological characteristics that don’t fit neatly into the definition of male or female—and their efforts to prevent unnecessary surgery on intersex kids. I read about campaign financ
e reform. Fracking. Islamophobia. The responsibility of the media in a post-truth society. Noise. Noise. Noise. What to say? What can I do?

  Eventually, I sink into the darkness of sleep.

  After another twenty-four hours incommunicado, I finally crack and tell Manny the whole sob story over a can of Pringles in the Amazing Stories break room. If any of my friends are going to sympathize, it’s the guy whose case of unrequited love is essentially a chronic condition.

  “That’s shitty, man. I can’t believe you got canned, and then she ghosted you. Just when you were about to get some action, too. You have the worst luck.”

  I don’t want to argue over the definition of “ghost,” but I’m reasonably sure that’s not what happened. “I think her parents may have just put her in total lockdown. The A-Plus Twitter and Facebook accounts have gone completely dark.”

  “What shows up in your e-mail tracking?”

  “My what?”

  Manny practically sprains his eyeballs rolling them. “Have you learned nothing about how to obsessively follow someone over the internet, young Padawan?”

  In less than five minutes he’s set me up and I’ve sent Jocelyn another e-mail:

  Subject: Still thinking about you.

  Hope you’re okay.

  -Will

  After I hit send, I stare at the little circle showing that tracking has been enabled until my eyes burn, half hoping it will turn into a green check mark, half dreading that I’ll finally get confirmation that Jocelyn has been actively ignoring my e-mails. It doesn’t take long for my brain to come up with scenarios where the program fails. For instance, if the tracker does show that the e-mail has been opened, it’s not guaranteed Jocelyn was the one who opened it, right? What if her dad made her give him her password and is vetting all her e-mails? Or worse, what if he’s logging into her e-mail and deleting my messages without even opening them?